velospace is what it is because of the amazing velospace community. Thank you to everyone who continues to make this the place to go for bikes. Here is to another great twelve months ahead.

- Greg

Previous velospace anniversary posts:
Year Two
Year Three
Year Four
Year Five

The IpHistory table is used to, among other things: calculate user statistics, provide data for the “Who’s Online” sidebar, and so on. The point is that the table is regularly used on the back end. The IP history information is very important from a server administration perspective because we track “bad” users by IP (and other patterns and metrics).

However, with 1.9 million rows being searched every time statistics or the “Who’s Online” sidebar was being called created a huge strain on the velospace server. The MySQL process would start gobbling up gigabytes of RAM, when under a normal load the process would only use around 400 megabytes of RAM. The solution was to move the 1.9 million records out of active use into an archive, which we can still search and use for server administration. We then flushed the IpHistory table, removing all its data.

velospace popped back up immediately after flushing the table. It took approximately 12 hours of troubleshooting to trace the problem down to the IpHistory table. As detailed elsewhere on this blog, the Drupal side of things has hiccups once in a while – though things have been quiet since we upgraded to the most recent version of MySQL. In this case, it took several hours to confirm that the Drupal side was not the source of the problems.

In addition to cleaning out the IpHistory table, some tweaks were made to the site’s my.cnf file, and to some of the Drupal modules we have running. We hope the changes make the site more stable.

- Greg

We give big big BIG thanks to the velospace community for making this a wonderful year. Your enthusiasm, creativity, and love of bikes drives the site. Here is to another great twelve months ahead.

- Greg

Previous velospace anniversary posts:
Year Two
Year Three
Year Four

- Greg

You have been able to fill out lots of information about your bikes on velospace since the site went live: frame size, crankset, chain, brakes, rims, hubs, suspension, and so on. Starting today, you can record your bike’s serial number. All serial numbers are privately stored and only viewable to the person who uploaded the bike. Storing serial numbers will help in the event a bike is lost or stolen and you need to provide proof of ownership when filing a police or insurance report.

This screenshot shows the serial number display on my Spicer. I am the only one who can see the serial number, and I have to be logged in to see it.

To add serial numbers to bikes already on velospace, take the following steps:

1. Log-in
2. Go-to your my stuff portal
3. Click on your bike on the top right hand column
4. Click on the “edit” tab on your bike page
5. Scroll down to the second to last input box and enter your serial number
6. Click Submit to complete the process

We would like to give a big thanks to user Ruffinit who suggested this great feature. If you have any ideas for improving velospace please send us some feedback.

- Greg

The latest type of spam has been batch account creation with spammy user names and URLs in profiles. The spammers hoped to get credibility with search engines by having links on velospace pointing back to their websites. Even though all these links were tagged nofollow, the spammers still kept on creating new accounts. After thinking about the problem, I’ve gone ahead and removed webpages from user profiles; velospace users won’t be able to post their websites in their profiles. Any websites included in existing profiles won’t be displayed. There are also a few new behind-the-scenes features that will help deal with account spam, but I’m going to keep those details off the radar for the time being.

- Greg

To view all of a user’s friends, get to their profile page (see e.g. greg’s profile) and scroll down to the Friends part of the page, about half way down. Note: you will only see random friends of a user if they have added any. To see all friends of a user click on the new View all friends link, which will take you to the new feature, which as promised, gives you thumbnails of all a user’s friends. This page lists all of a user’s friended bikes with the most recently uploaded first. Take a look around, and for an amazing list of over 11,000 friended bikes as of today, see CONDENADO’s full list. He is the most prolific friender on velospace by far.

Thanks to suicide_doors for suggesting this great feature. Please drop me a note with any you have.

- Greg

The most recent velospace downtime was caused by the Drupal database “variable” table getting corrupted and pulling down the site. Load on the machine was spiking up around 100 and things were ugly all around. Thankfully the problem was solved and life will go on as usual. We appreciate your patience.

- Greg

Tonight I found and fixed a problem that has vexed the site: crashes due to inadequate database resources. velospace runs on a MySQL database. As a popular site, velospace gets a lot of database traffic. Previously, MySQL was running out of open files to put and grab queries.

The fix, described here, here, and here doubled the number of files that the database can have open at any given time. The key was increasing the ‘ulimit -s [open files]‘ to 2048 from 1024. This should solve the recent downtime headaches and provide for a smoother experience.

- Greg

velospace is sponsoring a great cause this summer and so should you: the Illini 4000 for Cancer.

The Illini 4000 for Cancer is a bike ride across America from New York City to San Francisco to raise money and awareness of cancer issues and cancer’s effects on our lives. Every summer a group of University of Illinois students band together and ride their bikes for 4,000 miles from coast-to-coast in support of this cause through many towns and cities – maybe yours.

The Illini 4000′s mission:

The Illini 4000 is a non-profit organization dedicated to the fight against cancer, the support of those affected by cancer, and the documentation of how cancer impacts the lives of Americans. Through our annual cross-country bike ride, we reach out to new communities and new individuals each year spreading our message of hope and awareness. As long as cancer remains an issue of public health, as long as cancer affects daily life, and so long as cancer takes its toll, we shall continue our fight.

Interested in helping? Pitch in one of three ways:
1. Donate money
2. Host the riders when they are in your town
3. Sponsor the ride

velospace and the Illini 4000 will be working together this summer to support this great cause. Riders will be chiming in on velospace as the ride progresses give us updates and take part in the velospace community.